Instant Replay was invented by Tony Verna in 1963 and first used in a football game between the U.S. Military Academy and the Naval Academy. Tony Verna is also an inventor of the present invention. The purpose of instant replays is to review action that has taken place in a live event immediately after the action occurs. Throughout the decades since it was first introduced, the Instant Replay has been in continual use as a form of video review, from the announcer's point of view, during a sporting event. Through the years, the Instant Replay has visually evolved but the nature of commenting over instant replays has fundamentally remained unchanged. The Instant Replay has also been used in the broadcast of entertainment events other than sports.
In sports competition such as football, basketball, and most other sports, every player is involved in every play in some manner, so that it becomes interesting to isolate a player's thinking before the actual game takes place. Players have to be constantly thinking in order to execute the hundreds of variations of their offensive and defensive schemes. It would be of great interest to the fans to experience the game from the player's point of view. It would allow a player to convey his or her unique viewpoint, so that the fans can personally identify with him/her. The Talking Replay specifically taps into the player's insights, which heretofore have remained silent during a broadcast. Now a player will be able to provide a pre-recorded audio comment over a recorded video replay of a related action that took place after the pre-recorded audio comment during a live event.
Currently, there does not exist a television procedure or software application currently that allows the production team of a live broadcast to interject a sports athlete's comments into an instant replay of action by the sports athlete recorded from a live broadcast of a sporting event occurring after recording of the sport athlete's comments. There are no prior procedures in sports broadcasting whereby the pre-recorded audio recorded of an athlete is linked to a related video recording (Instant Replay) of the athlete from a broadcast of a sporting event being aired after the pre-recorded audio is obtained from a sports athlete, so that the sports athlete's personal comments can enlighten, or perhaps even correct, the game's storyline that is currently being presented by the announcing team's third-person approach.
Tony Verna has also invented the Instant Football Widget described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,596,759, and Spoken Scores, described in provisional patent application Ser. No. 61/499,623. The Instant Football Widget allows scores, football direction of play, and real time spoiling of the football location to be shown in a small footprint summary in the form of a simple graphic on a display screen, and includes the capability for expansion with addition real-time game information. Spoken Scores is technology that allows various games of interest to a user to be monitored by a service and then push as a text message to a handheld device where it can be converted into a spoken score for announcement over the device. Both of these innovations by Tony Verna can be incorporated as features into the present invention.